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Republican Women Seek to Play Down Social Issues

Katie Sly of the College Republican National Committee got her hair styled on Monday at the Woman Up! Pavilion outside the Republican National Convention.Credit
Max Whittaker for The New York Times

TAMPA, Fla. — About a block from the Republican National Convention, in a strip mall next to a Hooters restaurant, is the Woman Up! Pavilion, sponsored by the Young Guns Network, a “super PAC” promoting conservative candidates.

Its décor is welcoming, with curved banquettes accented by hot-pink carnations and red roses. There is a hair salon offering blowouts, and a gift shop. Cocktails like the Lady Lemonade and Woman-Tini are sold for $6.

The pavilion has a one-room women’s suffrage museum, and forums on topics like “Advocacy Means Business: Building Your Organization” and “The Europeanization of the United States.”

What is missing from the all-inclusive spot? Any discussion of the social issues — abortion, same-sex marriage, insurance coverage for birth control — that have at times engulfed the Republican nominating contest.

“We don’t talk social issues,” said Mary Ann Carter, policy director for the Young Guns Network, who manages the pavilion, as several young women from the convention milled about sipping coffee and shopping for souvenirs. “We talk about the economy. We talk about health care. We talk about energy.”

This refrain is often heard in and around the convention. In dozens of interviews, women at the convention made clear that social issues are taking a back seat. Even those who passionately agree (or disagree) with the new party platform — calling for traditional marriage, public display of the Ten Commandments and a sweeping ban on abortion — were unwilling to discuss it. (An exception was Mitt Romney’s sister Jane, who declared that a ban on abortion is “never going to happen” in a Romney administration.)

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Cindy McCain, left, listened to a speech by Ann Romney at the Women for Victory breakfast on Tuesday in Tampa.Credit
Max Whittaker for The New York Times

Instead, women at the convention preferred to point to opening night on Tuesday, when a parade of Republican women took to the podium, including Ann Romney, who spoke about her family, and Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, who preached a gospel of economic empowerment, free of meddlesome government rules.

Being visible was one way, the women said, to counter the Obama campaign’s charge that their party is waging a war on women.

“They’re doing the soft love approach,” said Sandra Stroman, a convention participant from Chester, S.C. “They’re holding up our women in this party and putting those women in front of the cameras, saying, ‘Here are our Republican women. Do they look like we have waged war against them?’ ”

With the intention of appealing to voters beyond the party’s base, many Republican women are simply avoiding the mention of abortion or gay rights because they are seen as too divisive in such a close, contentious race. Some acknowledge deliberately playing down their own views as a strategic move. Instead, they want to talk about the economy, just like the Romney campaign.

“Anything that gives women the idea that they can’t find friends in the Republican Party is unhelpful,” said Kristen Soltis, a pollster and an adviser to Crossroads Generation, a pro-Romney super PAC. “I think what will be decisive in this election are those sort of kitchen-table economics: How am going to pay my bills? How am I going to make sure my kids get a good education? How am I going to make sure my parents are healthy?”

Ms. Soltis, 28, is personally in favor of same-sex marriage but is opposed to abortion. She says she tends not to focus the party platform, and hopes that one day it might shift to the center again, at least on social issues.

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Members of the National Federation of Republican Women watched Mia Love, a candidate for Congress, address the convention. Her speech focused on her parents, immigrants from Haiti.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

“I think particularly as more young people come to the party, that may lead to the party having different positions on things as the years go on,” she said, adding that in the meantime, “I consider myself focused on fiscal issues.”

Mia Love, a mayor in Utah who is running for Congress, usually highlights her Mormon-inspired conservatism, but she, too, shied away from social issues in her speech at the convention on Tuesday, speaking instead about the lives of her parents, who were immigrants from Haiti. “I haven’t focused on those social issues because the economic issues are important to my district,” she said in an interview. “Fiscal discipline, our debt and deficit. We need to focus on work.”

Ms. Love’s friend Deidre Henderson, a candidate for the Utah State Senate who agrees with the party platform, described herself as “very pro-life” but added that social issues are “a distraction. What we need to focus on is the economy.”

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The distancing from social issues is all the more urgent, some conservative women acknowledged, in the aftermath of highly polarizing comments Representative Todd Akin of Missouri made two weeks ago, claiming that in cases of “legitimate rape” one need not consider abortion because the female reproductive system shuts itself down.

“Of course it was unhelpful,” said Ms. Soltis saying that Democrats have seized the issue to support their contention that Republicans are hostile to women. “I think that because unemployment is so high, Democrats think it’s much easier to win over women voters if they talk about these social issues. I think that’s a risky gamble for them, because I so firmly believe that this will be an election about the economy.”

And on that subject, Republican women are intent on returning the incoming fire from the Democrats. Rae Lynne Chornenky, the president of the National Federation of Republican Women, addressed the convention on Monday, repeated the oft-discredited claim that 92 percent of all the jobs lost under Mr. Obama were those of women.

“If there is a war against women,” she said, “it is President Obama who waged it.”

Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting from Palm Harbor, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on August 31, 2012, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Republican Women Seek to Play Down Social Issues. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe